Food

Saturday, 11 May 2013

The wildfire season is upon us.
Until it rains, as we hope it will, soon, the following activities are banned from all Santa Fe city recreational areas: romantic campfires, wood- or charcoal-based cookery, cigarette smoking, fast-and-fun
spark-generating vehicles and sky-piercing fireworks. Similar prohibitions apply to County and State lands. Last year the fire threat was so ominous that hiking trails were totally closed for many long weeks.

Meanwhile, rivers are trickles, reservoirs are low, forests are tinder waiting for ignition and—horror of horrors!—the chili crop in Hatch is under threat. Water needed for pepper irrigation is being slurped up before it reaches the chili fields in southern New Mexico. The way things are going, meteorologists say, the harvest will be small and any little green pods that manage to get to market will be expensive.

A crisis in the making.

In Northern New Mexico we put green chilis in or on practically everything—and I’m not referring only to huevos rancheros, enchiladas, tamales, empanadas and the like. How about steak with a green chili and mushroom topping? Or baked potatoes crowned with green chilis? Or marinara laced with green chilis? Or green chilis tucked under the skin of a roasting chicken? As for desert, consider chipotlé strawberry gelato or red hot dark chocolate made by the Chocolate Cartel in Albuquerque. When people mention Christmas in Santa Fe, they’re not thinking about Santa Claus. They’re ordering a dish that features red and green chili.

A chili habit is expensive to maintain, especially since a year’s supply has to be bought in a single swoop. Growers, having charred their chilis in wire cages rotated over beds of charcoal, stuff the limp hot pods into pint-sized baggies that have been been selling for five bucks a pop. Let’s do the math. I may live alone, but I still need twelve of fifteen bags to see me over the winter and through to the next harvest. That’s some sixty to seventy-five dollars per annum. Now multiply that sum by three or four to satisfy a whole family’s taste for tingle. Ouch!

Tingle varies, of course. There’s mild for wimps, medium for those who can stand a little excitement and hot for people who like to play with fire. A good trick is to mix a baggie of fire with a bag of medium. Otherwise the heat in the dish you’re preparing may be so strong you can’t taste anything else.

Chilis bought, you take the bags home and freeze them, and here’s what you do when you hanker for some green chili. You thaw the chilis, peel off their cellophane-like skins, remove their heads and seeds, then chop, chop, chop. That’s it. Use the chopped chilis à la paragraph four above. Or any other way that comes to mind. If you have any freshly chopped chilis left over or want to ready several bags at once, do this: pretend you’re making drop cookies, but don’t put the cookie tray in the oven. Place it in the freezer. When the dollops are frozen, collect them into freezer bags and store them until you need them. Thawed eight or more months later, the chili will be just fine. But who can wait that long?

Meanwhile, you’ll need two dollops of chilis (about two tablespoons) for the two-egg omelet we’re about to make. In an hour or less they’ll thaw and be ready to use.

The eggs I prefer are from the super duper local poultry farm called Pollo Real, which retails chicken products every Saturday morning at the Farmers’ Market. (Tuesdays, too, during mid-summer.) These eggs are so fresh it’s almost a crime to tart them up, but the better the eggs the better the omelet. For cheese, what you’ll need is aged cheddar or maybe gruyère. At any rate, grate some cheese with a flavor you like. You’ll need a couple of ounces or more, depending on the runniness of the omelet you’re aiming for.

As for the rest, here’s what also goes into my chili cheese omelet: a couple of tablespoons of chopped fresh tomato and a generous tablespoon of chopped onions. Vary and balance the amounts to please your own palate. That’s what slapdash cooking is all about. Being free. Having fun. Eating well.

When it comes to beating the eggs, I blend the whites and yellows, then add a tablespoon or so of water and beat a little more. I apply the thinnest possible film of butter to a non-stick pan, get the surface really hot, pour in the eggs, scatter chili, tomato and onions over one half of the egg rondel and sprinkle the cheese over the whole circle. What comes next is simple but important. I cook my omelets warily on fairly low heat, to keep the eggs from burning while the veggies get semi-cooked and the cheese melts.

Shortly after the bottom surface of the omelet begins to show hints of golden browning, I fold the non-veg half over the half with veggies. Sometimes I flip the resulting half moon, too, once or twice, depending on what’s happening inside. The goal is to congeal the egg as much as you like without scorching the outer surface of the omelet. If you use good eggs, by the way, it's not necessary to cook them to death. What’s more, a decent omelet isn’t leathery.

Finally, slide the omelet onto one plate—or cut it in half and serve two people who want to have room for toast and muffins, too. Some words of caution: if presentation is important to you, don’t try to make a four egg omelet this way. You’ll end up with curious free form offerings on the plates.

By rights this chili cheese omelet should be served with green chile sausage, also from organic venders at the Farmers’s Market. But bacon’s just as good, and that’s all I had on hand: local bacon, smoked just right. Better than filet mignon. For breakfast, anyway.

Friday, 27 July 2012

As a wee lad I had the opportunity to tour Disney Studios. A budding artist even at four, I enjoyed observing the then-studio cartoonists at work. On a later holiday- but still while in elementary school- my family and I were privileged to have Walt Disney’s flat at the top of the Fire Station in Disneyland all to ourselves for a long weekend. As I am sure all readers understand, the enthralled little boy in me still cherishes these memories.

I’ve had many enchanting experiences. I watched stars glint in a pristine dark night sky above Monte Toyon in the Santa Cruz mountains. I gazed down on the magnificent Yosemite Valley from Half Dome. I wandered the forests of mottled light that surround Patrick’s Point, seeking the Ewoks of my imagination. I held my breath watching wales breach the Pacific from Patrick's Point's sacred central rock. I soaked up the warm, jeweled nights of Nassau. I stood on the site of Bunker Hill in Boston. I walked Capitol Park in the Nation’s capitol. I toured the North and South East coasts of Cornwall.

I rode the route along the Fowey River to Lerryn which was one of the routes that inspired Wind in the Willows. I gazed on the Talland Bay from a bench within the soul refreshing graveyard of Talland Church. I photographed England’s breath taking cathedrals in Wells, Salisbury, Bristol, Exeter. I listened to Timothy Leary expound on LSD in the Raymond College Common Room. I’ve talked with Allen Ginsberg after enjoying the poetry of Jack Kerouac. I have experienced the force of nature who was Eric Hoffer.

I remember vividly lounging in the warm light that flooded the Common Room alcove, smiling at its fountain, my first morning at Raymond College, my Hogwarts. It reminded me of my great uncle’s cabin in the then undeveloped Santa Monica Hills, the tiny but truly "burbling" creek that wandered through the ferns that covered his hillside, the steep trail that led from the Cabin in which some of the 20th Century's great theologians had debated life.

But few experiences have been as magical as Whitby. To think, we only went to Whitby to avoid the crowds during the week of the British Open (which took place 200 yards from our home flat).

Whitby

Whitby nestles into the North Yorkshire seaside, straddling the mouth of the Esk River.

(Left to Right Up: Whitby & Abbey from the Esk, Whitby along the Esk.)

(Left to Right, Whitby & Whitby Bay. Photos by John C. Dyer)

We stayed in a “self-catering” cottage, rented through Whitby Holiday Cottages.

(Left, Holiday Cottage,

Cottage BedRm

By John C. Dyer)

Whitby has fantastic historical associations. The earliest documented English poet, Caedmon, lived and at worked at Whitby Abbey. The Abbey in its original form pre-dates the time of King Edwin of Northumbria. Edwin's daughter, St. Helena, became its Abbess.

Sunday, 19 February 2012

(This is the second of a two-part photo story by John C. Dyer. The first can be found here.)

Davis, California

The City of Davis is best known as the home of the University of California, Davis a world class institution. But it is also a marvelous place to visit in its own right, especially appealing to those who like a traditional city center and village atmosphere. (Photos left: "Village House" and "Detail Village Garden" by John C. Dyer, August 2011). (Photo right "City Street" by John C. Dyer, August 2011)

It is at once charmingly quaint (Photos left: "Tea house," "Tea for Two," and "Orange Square" by John C. Dyer, August, 2011).

Davis is the home to a busy Farmer’s Market, one of the first in the modern Farmer’s Market movement, featuring entertainment as well as veggies for its many customers.But of course, the University is never far from sight. (Photos right: "Uni student" and "Farmers Market Scene by John C. Dyer, 2011).

You really could not make Davis up, but to the English eye it offers all that a town centre should, small local shops and restaurants, walking and biking the norm and the Unitrans double decker, vintage, iconic London Routemaster buses. The farmers’ market is very impressive after the cholesterol loaded offerings of a much smaller market in St Annes.

University of California, Davis

The campus of the University of California is a delight to visit. Cork Oaks shade its central square. Multiple sculptures intrigue the walker (Photos left: UCD campus and photos right: Intrigue, Using Your Head and Shoe by John C. Dyer, August 2011).The campus consciously connects with England, using London buses for transport and decorating the station with an old Telephone Booth. Putah Creek winds through campus. (Photo left: "Phone Box," by John C. Dyer, August 2011.

UC Davis' Horticultural Heritage

The University displays its horticultural heritage with a breathtaking display of trees, plants, and flowers buzzing with bees.

Labour Day saw a handful of students and very little bike action. Two days later it was no longer safe to walk in a daydream for cyclists asserting their right to the cycle paths and young people swarming around the town and campus. We bid adieu as the students began to arrive for the Fall.

Saturday, 29 October 2011

These are the glory days for the Farmer's Market in Santa Fe. It's chilly at eight in the morning when the market opens. Jacket weather. And there was ice in the folds of my newspaper when I retrieved it from the driveway one day last week.

But the sky was already blue when I reached the Market, and the sun made everything look so promising, cooking-wise, that I wanted to snatch it all up. I’m a carnivore, and fairly unapologetic about this proclivity, but I’m helplessly addicted to vegetables, too. I can’t resist them, even in the supermarket with the overhead pipes spewing a disgusting cold mist over everything green. When I’m confronted with the real thing, mere hours its living connection with the earth that nurtured it, I become a ravenous locavore. Uncontrollable.

And how could anyone resist these last fruits of the season? Tomatoes, some grape-like, some surely weighing a pound each, all red, red, red. And a precious few baskets of raspberries. And bunches of beets, deep red violet. And ristra-strings of hot peppers so intensely aflame with color that my inner Carmen wanted to break into a flamenco on the spot. Not to mention the orange carrots and pumpkins and the golden squash and the slick green chiles still waiting to be roasted. And the purple fingerling potatoes and the dark satiny eggplant. And the pearly white Vidalia onions. And the garlic that comes wrapped in its own white tissue, like a gift to chefs. And skinny green beans. And vases of zinnias and cosmos and marigolds. Plus apples, of course. Macintosh. Rome. Delicious. Apples by the pint, by the peck, by the bushel, their skins taut with juiciness that spurts down your chin if you don’t bite carefully, which reminds me of the inimitable taste of just pressed apple juice, set out in little cuplets. To tempt you to buy a bottle. Or two.

Talk about cornucopia! These final weeks of summer vegetables are like the finale at a fireworks display, all the more glorious because the program is almost over. And so, as I walked through the market this morning, exceeding my budget as usual, I gloried in the color, but couldn’t help thinking of the killer frost that’s due any night now.

Among other delights, including a week's supply of leafy salad mix and a mammoth cauliflower I intended to curry, I bought several pounds of tomatoes, not at all sure what I’d do with them, except that I'd have to do it fast, because they couldn't get any riper without going bad. Still, I had to have them. There's no such thing as a surplus of vegetables in my house.

Once I got home with my booty, the fate of the tomatoes had already been settled: soup. What's more, I decided, I’d make the soup, for the first time in my life, without cracking a recipe book. Slapdash cook style.

Actually, it was a matter of trying to remember a formula I’d already felt the need to improvise last year when I discovered a peculiar and apparently invariable pattern among tomato soup recipes .The hot soups all wanted cream. The cold soups didn’t. And—here’s the nearly unanimous and criminal part!— most recipes called for a tablespoon or more of canned tomato paste as well as fresh tomatoes. Intensity at the cost of authenticity? No way, I decided. Why disguise the flavor of fresh tomatoes at the peak of perfection? Ditto for the addition of cream, plus this: why pile on the calories?

Anyway the recipe I’d come up with was so simple I did indeed remember it perfectly. Better yet, anyone can follow it without a lot of finicky measuring. Start with three pounds of tomatoes (so you’ll wind up with enough soup to make the effort worthwhile). Chop a medium onion and a big stalk of celery and fry them in any oil you want (I use olive) until they’re soft, which means the onions are translucent. It wouldn’t hurt to add a small clove of garlic, diced, a couple of minutes before the frying’s done. If you decide to skin the tomatoes, cover them with boiling water, briefly, to loosen the skins, but you don’t need to. You’ll be blending the soup before you’re finished. Anyhow, dice the tomatoes and toss them into the pot with the sauteed onion, add a quart of chicken stock and boil until the tomatoes are soft.

After the tomato mixture cools a little, blend it until it’s less than perfectly smooth. (I like it with a little texture.) Then add another quart or two of chicken stock (I make my

Saturday, 08 January 2011

A certain person hates the mere thought of Slapdash Cooking. He’s a mathematician. Mathematicians like precision. QED and all that.

Other family members focus on other foibles of Slapdash Cookery. A very silly Christmas present turned up with my name on it this year. It was a dish towel, with a sad story: I cooked. It burned. I ordered takeout.

OK, I'm guilty, except for the takeout part. The Slapdash Cook is nothing if not ingenious about saving the day.

I revel in the rhythms of chopping, dicing, slicing, mixing, blending, as well as in the taste-testing that transmutes raw ingredients into deliciousness. However, I’m notorious for forgetting that food over flame needs to be checked on, often. We all know that a watched pot never boils. In my kitchen there’s a corollary. The unwatched pot scorches or catches fire.

The worst thing that ever happened was an oil fire that licked at cabinets and sooted up the house before it could be extinguished with heaps of baking soda. What a mess from a little oil in a frying pan! Flame creep is the downside of gas burners.

The more banal scenario involves singed broccoli or sauce sticking onto pots with enough char to tinge the flavor of what’s technically not burnt. Those dark flecks in the tomato sauce? They aren’t flakes of oregano or basil. And there won’t be as much risotto as expected tonight, because the rest is clinging to the pot. As was much of the oatmeal I meant to have for breakfast this morning. Oh well! I overate last night.

Timers, you say. Why don’t I use them? Simple. They don’t like me. The timer was the first part of my oven’s control apparatus to die. Replacing the clock mechanism will impoverish me only slightly less than buying a new oven. Meanwhile, with lots of Christmas cooking on the agenda, I bought a timer from the kitchenwares section of the local supermarket. Its signal wasn’t musical, but the message got through. Hey there! Check the cookies! Unfortunately it died a premature death, shortly after the gang arrived. Now I’m relying on my Blackberry, which worries me. If all timers I touch are jinxed, will my cell phone work when I’m stuck in the snow and need to summon a wrecker?

Well, Christmas in Santa Fe wasn’t white this year. It was brown, which disappointed my snow-loving family. However, the Slapdash Cook won over the doubting number-cruncher. How? With Curried Winter Squash Soup.

Acorn squash. Butternut squash. They’re piled high in all markets now. Either works, but I prefer the deeper flavor of the acorn variety. Whichever, however, it’s a battle to muscle these things open. I plant a chef’s knife into the belly of a squash, grab a hammer, then pound on point and handle, until the blade deigns to cut through. The hard-won halves get plopped, seed side down, on a foil-lined cookie sheet, and baked at about 350 ̊, until the flesh is soft. (Test with a skewer—en garde!) That will take up to 45 minutes. Or more. Keep (ahem!) testing. (By the way, given what’s below, I hope you chose a medium-sized acorn or a slightly less than medium-sized butternut.)

Now comes the delectably aromatic part of the soup-making. Dice a fat onion and two robust stalks of celery. Sauté them, gently, in two tablespoons of oil, plus as much butter as you like or need to do the job. Once the onion approaches transparency, add an apple, peeled and diced. When all elements are soft but not mushy, add roughly two teaspoons of curry powder, the amount depending on the oomph of the spice and your love for piquancy. Fry, stir and scrape long enough to tease out the flavors of the spices without letting brown turn to black. This is a tricky but key element in all curry Cooking, so you're stuck with another judgement call! But that’s the nature of Slapdash cooking. It's not for cowards or the indecisive.

Finally, squash and spices must be eased into some combination of stock and milk or cream. I prefer 1/4 skim milk to 3/4 low-sodium organic chicken stock—or, better, the homemade kind, if there's any around. Now spoon-scrape the squash from its skin and get that blender or food processor going. Just remember: the liquid you add determines the soup you'll get—tangy (less milk) or unctuous (some cream, though too much will overpower the curry). Once the blending’s done, adjust the flavor and texture. You’ll have about two quarts of soup.

I’ve made this Curried Winter Squash Soup three times in the last month. Different squashes. Different curry powders. Different dairy/stock proportions. The final product is never the same, but it’s always delicious. In short, it's a typical slapdash concoction. No recipes. No finicky measurements. Terrific results.

And here’s the Christmas miracle. Not only did the mathematician ask for seconds, he asked for the recipe. What’s more, he declared that he's prepared (um—maybe) to follow the adventures of the—oh, horrors!—Slapdash Cook.

Sunday, 05 September 2010

Who cares? That’s what the Slapdash Cook says. Point your Prius toward the nearest farmers’ market and fill your ecologically-responsible, brought-from-home shopping bag with succulent red tomatoes. Or equally juicy yellow tomatoes. Or even (these days) purplish tomatoes. Just make sure they’re mere hours from the vine and so ripe you have to handle them more deferentially than eggs. When you get home, DO NOT stash them in the fridge. And don’t resist temptation. Attack! Chomp down with those dentist-enriching white incisors and slurp! slurp! slurp!

Ahem—for more genteel immediacy, slice a plateful of to- matoes at the peak of ripeness, drizzle them with olive oil, adorn them with fresh basil (from your garden, I hope) and that’s it. A salad to die for. Impossible to improve on. On the other hand, if you have lamb chops or a steak in need of company for dinner, slice the tomatoes in half and cap them with a mix of parmegiano-reggiano, chopped basil and freshly ground black pepper. Five minutes under the broiler is all it takes to create a savory crust. To keep the menu painless and consistent with the season, pile a platter with corn on the cob (also just picked, of course) for everyone to gnaw on.

What else have I been doing with this season’s heavenly tomatoes? Toasted cheese sandwiches: aged cheddar crowned with sliced tomato. Or a generous grating of the same excellent cheddar (note to cheese snobs: a fine cheddar is not to be sneered at) plus tomatoes chopped finely with Videlias and Bell (also too often despised) peppers to fill a Sunday breakfast omelet. Add strong-brewed Sumatra, green chili sausage, a delicate flour tortilla, the Sunday paper and a sun-bathed
portale: pure paradise. (Depressing headlines excepted.)

Ah, you say, this is too easy, even for the Slapdash Cook, who’s not illiterate, although she likes to putter around the kitchen as if she were. To that, I reply: there’s nothing wrong with easy when dining fresh from the garden. However, for kitchen slaves who suffer guilt from too much effortlessness, the recommended tomato magic for early September is gazpacho, the liquid salad from Spain. I’ve just finished blending my third batch of the year.

Here I must confess. When I first made gazpacho I was recipe-bound. Even so, it wasn’t easy. How large is a “medium” onion? How fat is a “large” tomato? As for garlic cloves, the size range is enormous. Just what does “three or four” cloves add up to in terms of teaspoons?

And then, as I gathered confidence, there was the day I was in the middle of a gazpacho and discovered I didn’t have red wine vinegar. Only white. And basalmic. Panic!!!! Boring or bold? I asked myself. Characteristically, I went for bold. Result: edible, but never repeated. The emergencies continued. Last week I’d brought home some sensuously perfect tomatoes, but the cucumber I recalled as hiding under the celery and carrots in my fridge wasn’t there. Also—sigh!—I had red peppers, but no green peppers. No problem! Get that blender going! As for today, all the requisite veggies were on hand, but I was half a cup short of tomato juice. Oh well! Carry on!

In short, start with the basic gazpacho recipe, then play. Want it sweeter? Go with red peppers. Want it milder? Increase the cucumber. Love the piquant? Double the garlic and increase the chili pepper or whatever you favor for the tongue tingling effect. It’s hard to imagine a substitute for the olive oil (Sesame? Ugh!), but there are vinegars galore to experiment with. Probably not raspberry, though. There are some experiments that even the Slapdash Cook balks at.

Oops! I almost forgot the croutons. Well, you'll have to make them yourself, but it's easy. Chop some good bread into 1/3" cubes--small is good, with croutons, toss with a bit of olive oil, scatter on a cookie sheet and crisp at about 200 degrees while the veggies are being blended. Spoon, according to impulse, on top of the gazpacho, along with diced cucumber, onion and pepper.

But the garnish isn't really necessary. Make things sinfully easy for yourself. Serve the gazpacho as a beverage. With those tomato-graced toasted cheese sandwiches. And for desert: sliced peaches. Assuming you haven't consumed them slurpy-style, which is how ripe peaches (and ripe tomatoes) were intended to be eaten.

Saturday, 07 August 2010

Despite the best efforts of a brigade of blister bugs who gnawed eagerly at my basil seedlings last month, I gathered my first batch of basil leaves this afternoon. I’ll be making pesto for dinner tonight. Then I’ll fill a cookie tray with dollops of pesto and slide it into the freezer. When the little
mounds of pesto are frozen solid, I’ll pop them into a plastic bag and keep them until they’re needed. Usually that means I’m concocting the classic pesto and pasta, a scandalously easy dinner for hot nights when serious cooking is less inviting than a visit to the searing sections of hell.

Equally quick and easy, assuming a willingness to heat up the oven, is this: insinuate one of those thawed dollops of pesto under the skin of a chicken breast or thigh. A half hour later, the skin is crispy, the meat is savory and dinner is underway. Sprigs of tarragon or rosemary, I’ve discovered work equally well. I grab my scissors, do a little snipping in my herb garden and ensconce the chicken on the sprigs that haven’t been slid between skin and meat. That way the flavor permeates from two directions.

So I take great pleasure in my herb garden, which also boasts thyme, oregano and mint. Already I have bunches of oregano hanging from a shower rod. Whether I’m cooking Mexican or Italian style next winter, I’ll be using my own dried oregano.

Everywhere in Santa Fe now pavements are smeared and sticky from the pulp of unwanted apricots allowed to rot and plop to the ground from overhanging trees. I don’t understand this. How can anyone let these luscious apricots go to waste? The same thing happens during cherry season. The walkways are littered with pulp and pits. A crime. A sin.

Happily there are those who take proper advantage of the fact that apricots and cherries, though not native, thrive here. Their fruity, wholly natural jams and jellies are available at the Farmers’ Market. Some people present a bottle of wine to the host and hostess when they’re invited to dinner. I take jars of local jam. It’s that good. I also make up boxes of jams for gifting at Christmas.

I planted an apricot tree shortly after I moved into my newly renovated house. When spring came, my tree burst into blossom just as it was supposed to. What visions I had! Bowls and bowls of perfectly ripened apricots. Golden apricots. With a pink blush to them. Me, slurping lasciviously. Licking my lips and fingers. Having another. And another. Then came a vicious early April freeze. The blooms went brown. They fell off. No apricots that year.